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Compliance & Co.

The driving forces of data archiving

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  1. Archiving

The archiving of important business data is elementary for compliance and the minimization of risks. The requirements for legally compliant data storage are becoming increasingly complex.

 

Key drivers are legal and internal compliance regulations, risk minimization and data security. In addition, there are business requirements for costs, efficiency and service. One thing is certain: Since data must sometimes be stored for several decades, a future-proof archiving approach is indispensable.

The key drivers of archiving

Today's data archiving requirements demand that companies implement a flexible and future-proof archiving solution. Outdated archive silos often cannot meet increasingly complex requirements due to their limitations and drawbacks. The most important drivers of data archiving include:

Compliance

When it comes to data archiving, companies are required to comply with internal guidelines and legal regulations - these include, for example, GDPR, tax regulations, HIPAA, SEC17a-4, SOX and various industry regulations. These requirements are designed to protect the integrity, accuracy, and availability of data during the retention period, among other things.

 

Business risks can only be minimized if data is protected and available for the long term. In addition, from a legal perspective, data must be presentable when needed and serve as evidence in disputes - for example, in the area of product liability.

Risk minimization

During the retention period of important data, there are numerous risks that can threaten or damage business information. These include, for example, insider data corruption, ransomware attacks, unintentional falsification, unauthorized tampering, or data loss due to migrations and hardware replications.

 

Once data is corrupted or lost, the legal or economic consequences can be immense, as data can sometimes be critical to business success. Organizations thus face the constant challenge of minimizing these risks.

Cost

Another driver for data archiving is the IT cost development. Generally speaking, organizations gain important flexibility through virtualization and can exploit cost advantages through the demand-driven use of IT resources. These advantages can also be exploited in the area of archiving: To keep costs under control, organizations need to increase IT efficiency across the board and optimize their IT infrastructure.

 

On the one hand - in view of the ever-increasing volumes of data - it is necessary to control the growth of primary storage. On the other hand, it must be possible to scale storage capacities at reasonable cost. Often, this requires a technology change in the storage landscape, resulting in data migration to other systems. In this process, the data is moved to less expensive storage and thus a cost reduction is achieved. A flexible and open archiving solution protects the investments made and enables more efficient use of storage capacities, which keeps costs in check.

Technological progress

Many documents and data are subject to retention periods of ten, thirty or more years. During these periods, the storage industry undergoes rapid technological advancement. In addition, data must be migrated multiple times during the retention period. At the same time, there is uncertainty as to which storage technology will prevail in the future.

 

This area of tension demands secure and economical handling of archive data. The answer: increasing flexibility and increased adaptability of archiving solutions in terms of infrastructure.

How can organizations meet these challenges?

The Software-Defined Archiving (SDA) approach allows organizations to respond to the increased demands of data archiving in an on-demand and flexible way.

 

Software-Defined Archiving offers hardware independence, breaking the inflexibility of proprietary archive silos. The archiving intelligence is provided by a software layer between business applications and the storage infrastructure, not by hardware itself. At the storage level, companies can thus rely on standard hardware and are not tied to specific vendors.

 

With proprietary systems, an increase in capacity - due to their relatively rigid design - is usually associated with high costs. Software-Defined Archiving solutions, on the other hand, enable archiving that is independent of the hardware and manufacturers used. This not only allows better and cheaper scaling with less effort, but also a combination of storage systems from different manufacturers.

 

In terms of compliance, most internal and legal regulations have similar requirements for data archiving: WORM storage (Write Once Read Many), retention for specific periods of time, encryption, access control, immutability of data, etc. By storing all information (payload, metadata, hash values) in self-sustaining and secure archive containers, a Software-Defined Archiving solution ensures the integrity of corporate data and thus minimizes business risks.

Whitepaper: Protection of business-critical data

Data retention periods of ten, thirty or even more years apply to many types of documents and data. At the same time, the storage industry experiences rapid technological advances. Solutions without hardware dependency and with open industry standards are in demand.

 

Learn in this whitepaper how a software-based approach can help you protect the integrity of corporate data and meet compliance requirements in the long term.

Download Whitepaper

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  1. Archiving
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